“It was fun, easy work. We stood up while we did it, but it seems like we were constantly taking breaks,” said Sheets, who lost her first husband in 1980 and became a widow a second time when Merle Sheets died in 2002. “I would say my hardest job was working at Thrifty. If you didn’t take in at least $100 a day, you were not a good salesperson.”

For Sheets, shell-inspecting was a great job whose perks also included the permission to wear pants. For Donaldson, however, the chance discovery last year that his spry friend was a pioneer and a patriot was a bolt from the historic blue yonder. And he was not about to keep it to himself.

“She is just so low key, she thinks I’m crazy,” said Donaldson, a Vietnam veteran who lives in a caretaker’s apartment attached to Sheets’ low-slung house. “But I said, ‘By doing what you did, you freed up a man to go to the front lines.’ When she first started to dig all this (memorabilia) out of boxes, I said, ‘Lura, you have to write a book.’ ”

Sensing that was probably never going to happen, Donaldson had to settle for sharing the news with the people behind “Bomb Girls,” the show that got Sheets talking about her World War II past in the first place.

“This was a unique part of the war effort, and maybe she can tell us what it was really like,” said Reelz executive producer Steve Holzer, who arrived at Sheet’s house from Los Angeles with a three-person crew and on-camera host Viviana Vigil. “Her story will help us remember a time we should never forget.”

If it were up to the former bomb girl, this would probably just be one of the many things she has done over the years to keep herself occupied. Like volunteering with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. Or painting landscapes. Or becoming a ham-radio operator.

But some stories are just too big to shrug off, so with the members of the young camera crew towering over her and the statuesque Vigil asking a flurry of questions, Sheets did her best to bring history to life.

She remembers being nervous on her first day on the inspection line, but being thrilled about the relaxed dress code. She remembers a lack of cat-fighting drama and a surplus of camaraderie. She remembers that on the day the war ended, she and her husband celebrated with a drink in a bar.

“I wasn’t a drinking girl in those days,” said Sheets, who now indulges in a daily cocktail of Black Velvet whiskey and water. “But we were celebrating.”

Because it was a long time ago in a lifetime far away, Sheets stories are neither long nor extravagantly detailed. But when Holzer asked her to end the interview with a Hollywood flourish, Sheets stepped up like the trouper she was and always will be.

“My name is Lura Sheets,” she said, her bright eyes twinkling into the camera “And I’m a real-life bomb girl.”